Monday, 9 March 2015

Good old Lord Ashcroft!He may prefer Belize to Blighty when it comes to coughing up taxes, but
our collective delusion that the UK is a functioning democracy amuses him, so
he makes up for it by providing regular polling information. He unleashed his
latest set of figures last Wednesday, to the accompaniment of various pundits’ jaws
going “clunk” on the floor.

Far from bouncing, the dead cat that is Scottish Labour is stiff,
immobile and beginning to honk a bit, with a rat hungrily gnawing at its “Vote
Conservative/Lib Dem/UKIP/Monster Raving Loony/Anyone but the Nats” rosette. The
SNP, by contrast, is a cheetah approaching full speed, pausing only to blow
kisses at a snarling mob of BBC newsreaders before streaking over the horizon. Whisper
it in case we jinx it, but those campaign posters with Commons benches covered
in tartan paint may turn out to be spookily clairvoyant.

Is this real or a dream? I’ve jabbed myself with so many cocktail
sticks lately I can’t drink a glass of water without leaking all over the sofa.
Of course, that’s partially down to my personal “Eeyore factor”, the natural pessimism
that grips me like a badly shrunk cardigan. If Scotland were 3-0 up against
Brazil with a minute to go, the Brazilians were down to nine men and I’d personally
bribed the referee, I’d still be expecting the floodlights to fail.

For those of you with a sunnier disposition (lucky bastards!!),
there are definite reasons to believe. As Scottish politics enjoys a golden age
of excitement, dynamism and unpredictability, Labour politicians seem to have drifted
catastrophically out of their comfort zone. Everyone around them is dancing,
and they’re looking on helplessly as if their feet were stuck in cement. And,
just to rub it in, the stroppy attitude of the Scottish public is really
beginning to disappoint them.

This was perfectly demonstrated by one golden moment during Kezia Dugdale’s appearance on
Thursday’s Question Time, which otherwise was eyeball-meltingly
dreadful even by her own recent standards. Just as
she embarked on a characteristically breathless witter about nurses, the
mansion tax and the profound badness of the SNP, a collective sick-to-the-back-teeth
growl from the audience abruptly stopped her in her tracks.

It seems that, in a totally ungrateful reaction to BBC clipe-in-chief Eleanor Bradford's long
hours standing over triage nurses
holding a giant stopwatch and sniggering, people in Scotland are starting to
get monumentally cheesed off with Labour’s incessant “NHS in crisis” guff. Never
mind, Eleanor and Kezia: as soon as whingeing nit-pickery becomes a recognised
disease you can call up NHS 24, where I’m sure you’ll receive a first-class
service.

Saturday’s Spring Conference in Edinburgh was Labour’s next
chance to put lead in their pencil, but ultimately all they could do with it
was stab themselves in the eye. I suppose it was a minor triumph that they kept
Ed Miliband away from tricky-to-eat food and the general public, but his keynote
speech had “Bloody hell, we’re screwed” written all over it.Its last-ditch embrace of anti-austerity
rhetoric also coincided jarringly with Jim Murphy’s chief of staff, John
McTernan, blabbing to the press about his admiration for Mrs Thatcher’s cuts,
in terms that suggested he urgently needed a cold shower.

As for the weekend’s other embarrassments, it’s probably
best to draw a discreet veil, not made of tin or in any way shaped like a hat,
over dinosaur Davie Hamilton’s slyly sexist, slanderous, sinister, six-word
swipe at Nicola Sturgeon. And the wisdom, or malice, of putting forward Ian
Murray - a man reduced to a juddering wreck if you so much as put a Yes sticker
on his window - to be char-broiled on Sunday
Politics Scotland by the increasingly dyspeptic Gordon Brewer.

Even on a UK-wide level, things are looking dodgy for
Labour. It’s a sair fecht when 106 of their MPs can each be publicly handed £1,000
of election funding by a warmongering scumbag, and no one thinks that makes the
party’s reputation worse than it already is.

Of course, with evil goblin McTernan pulling the strings, it’s
hard to believe Murphy and his masters of mince don’t still have tons of
jiggery-pokery in reserve. A campaign to save the Buchanan Street Steps, perhaps,
backed by a 4-page Record pull-out that
mysteriously fails to mention which party runs the council that’s scrapping
them in the first place? A Panorama special on the sufferings of
Margaret Curran, courageously chapping the doors of Shettleston, only to face a
hurricane of pithily-worded advice ending in “off”?Another cage-rattling intervention by Gordon
Brown, the most highly respected politician in the galaxy, never mind Scotland?
Another… VOW….?

Unless we really do suffer from collective amnesia (not that
we’d remember if we did), those would be desperate strokes by desperate folks, fully
deserving the rotten tomato treatment.The game is up, chaps: this is not a temporary tiff, it’s a full-blown
suitcases-chucked-on-to-front-lawn divorce.It’s not us, it’s you.

But the Ashcroft figures have been more than a thunderous
smack in the puss for Scottish Labour.They’ve also set the Palace of Westminster jangling, a dangerous thing
to do when chunks of it are already falling off.

Is the SNP, Scotland’s governing party since 2007, a perfectly
normal centre-left political grouping? In any other country on the planet,
people would ask what you were smoking if you even posed the question. But here,
in pre-election la-la land, we’re suddenly being asked to believe the SNP is a
horde of barbarians at the gates, smelling of yak-piss and bent on mayhem.What if, having been democratically elected,
they actually - good God, hold me back before I punch a squirrel - tried to
exercise influence in line with the voters’ wishes?

“Economic chaos,” opines Tory chairman Shant Grapps, or
whatever he’s decided to call himself this week. “Lethal cocktail for the UK,” intones
John Major, the world’s most high-profile combination of personality vacuum and
sex machine. “Disastrous for business and security,” warns Lord Bilimoria, someone
nobody’s ever heard of. In a lead-lined bunker somewhere, George Robertson must
already be sniffing his green felt-tips in readiness for a diatribe about the
collapse of the space-time continuum.

The whole thing uncannily resembles last September, when
that 51:49 poll in favour of Yes provoked a similar onslaught. But, fortunately,
there is one difference. Gut-wrenching experience as that was, independence
supporters emerged from it with reserves of bloody-mindedness so vast they make
the Forties Field look like the contents of a spittoon.

That may just be enough to enable us to hand our adversaries
their bahookies in a carrier bag this time. And charge them 5p for it into the
bargain.

One more wee thing, while I have your attention....Common Weal Perth and Kinross is holding a Festival of the Common Weal in and around Perth during the weekend of 10-12 April. It promises to be absolutely splendid, and I heartily recommend you get your hands on a ticket for one or more of the following:

About Me

I'm a writer who returned to Scotland in 2013 after 30+ years in the Home Counties. If you enjoy reading my ramblings, please return often and recommend me to your friends on Twitter, Facebook and Planet Earth. That way someone may one day give me money to do this sort of thing, which would be nice.
william_duguid@hotmail.com